Bruener on Going 4-8: 'Attitude Wasn't Where It Needed to Be'
Amid the uncharacteristic losing, the in-season Jimmy Lake firing and the general chaos that overtook the University of Washington football team in 2021, Carson Bruener was a glimmer of hope.
The redshirt freshman became a starter at inside linebacker for the first time. He was selected Pac-12 Defensive Player of the Week in his first start.
Bruener piled up 16 tackles against Stanford, 14 against Arizona State and 11 against Washington State, and he brought the Husky Stadium fans out of their seats with a 50-yard interception return against Oregon.
Yet he had almost no opportunity to celebrate his individual good fortune because his UW team bottomed out at 4-8, finishing with a four-game losing streak and a sense of hopelessness.
"It was rough," Bruener said. "I'm not going to lie, it was rough. Coming off each loss, you could see the team, the attitude that we had, it wasn't where it needed to be. It was a weird experience to be part of."
His suburban Redmond High School football team was a perennial underdog, but he expected more at the UW, where he was a legacy player.
His father Mark was a Husky tight end who played in two Rose Bowls, won a national championship and used it as a springboard to play 14 NFL seasons.
All of this gave the son, an active 6-foot-2, 224-pound defender, extremely high expectations when he chose to play in Montlake.
"I came here to win," Bruener said. "Having the first year be a COVID year, we were 3-1 and I was in quarantine one of the games that year, and I was like, 'OK, that doesn't count.' The very next year I was actually able to play. But this is not the Pac-12 championship team, the Rose Bowl team, that like the U-Dub usually is. I was just a little bit confused. It was rough going through."
One of the objectives of the Kalen DeBoer's new coaching staff, entrusted with undoing the damage, has been to foster a positive environment, one of constant encouragement and praise, and erase the lingering despair from everything coming unraveled.
Bruener much prefers positivity over losing, though he thinks the latter will serve a purpose in the long run. The Husky attitude, he intimated, is where it needs to be now.
"I think it gave us motivation," he said of finishing 4-8. "We now know what that feeling was like. We haven't had that in a little bit. It's something we don't want to ever endure again,"
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